Person: Systemd bad
Me: why
Them: IDK
The argument is basically that it does too much and as the motto of Unix was basically “make it do 1 thing and that very well”, systemd goes against that idea.
You might think it is silly because what is the issue with it doing many things. Arguably, it harms customization and adaptability, as you can’t run only 2/3 of systemd with 1/3 being replaced with that super specific optimisation for your specific use case. Additional, again arguably, it apparently makes it harder to make it secure as it has a bigger attack surface.
Sustemd is modular though, you don’t have to use every subsystem. The base init system and service manager is very comprehensive for sure.
I know it’s a typo, but Sustemd would be great for AmogOS! 😂
Unix was also made in 1969, Computers are a tiny bit more complicated now and expected to do slightly more than they did back then.
You can in fact run 2/3 Systemd whatever that means. Systemd components are modular so you can run the base system by itself if you want to.
Additionally systemd just works. You really don’t need to care about the details as running something like a web server or service is as simple as starting it. Dependencies are handled automatically.
More like it’s bad because of architecturial decisions (integrated init system; system state managemt in the same package as init and supervision), creating lots of unneeded complexity, number of CVE’s, how the developers behave (or don’t), and that you can’t have other init systems in the same repo without a fuckton of shims and wrappers.
Sounds like valid concerns to me.
That’s the problem with how most things Lennart designs are. They are typically 70-80 percent excellent ideas brilliantly architected, 10-20 percent decisions that we can agree to disagree on but well designed still, and ~10 percent horrifically bad ideas that he is unable to receive criticism on because of his standing, terrible attitude and ~90 percent good and acceptable ideas.
Another problem is that they all seem to be designed in a way that they are the One True Way to do something and are designed to choke out any alternatives because Lennart Knows Best.
I’m still ambivalent about having this much extra logic and complexity attached to my init system but the ship sailed long ago and I’m well into making lemonade at this point.
And funnily enough, the kernel doesn’t follow the unix philosophy either as far as I know.
I have heard that before in a joke setting, I would love to hear genuine arguments for and against it.
The debate is as old as Linux itself, and well documented.
It doesn’t seem to be a debate. “Microkernels are better” “yes but I don’t have the time for it” but thanks
At a high level, microkernels push as much as possible into userspace, and monolithic kernels keep drivers in kernel space
There are arguments for each e.g. a buggy driver can’t write into the memory space of another driver as easily in a micro kernel, however it’s running in the same security level as userspace code. People will make arguments for both sides of which is more secure
Monolithic kernels also tended to be more performant at the time, as you didn’t have to context switch between ring 0 and ring 1 in the CPU to perform driver calls - we also regularly share memory directly between drivers
These days pretty much all kernels have moved to a hybrid kernel, as neither a truly monolithic kernel nor a truly micro kernel works outside of theoretical debates
maybe systemd is a verb
e.g.
“damn homie got systemd by the opps”
I been told it was to big, but if you look at the Linux Kernel, it is huge.
People also love to say Unix, but Linux is not Unix.
But that only spells “LINU”.
Fine then: “Linux is not Unix, Xerxes!”
Imagine a very irate spartan shouting it as he hurls his spear across the room where the lawyers are having their discussion about the lawsuit pending between the linux loving spartans and the tyrannical unix using persians.
I was going more for a “Linu Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things?? Let’s Find Out!”
In fairness reading this thread all I see is systemd good
Why: i find sysvinit start up scripts too complicated to read/modify so let’s drop this gigantic mammoth that does a million other things on my lunux system so I don’t gave to learn how to write a shell script.
I don’t have much skin in the game and have been out of the loop for many years but don’t find many of the arguments in favour of systemd very convincing
It is very fast and easy
honestly though
I am fine with systemd. It works. It is more complicated than init.d
Before you copied some random file you edited and put it in init.d and it worked. Now you copy some systemd services file into systemd and run enable and start and it doesn’t work because you don’t know what you are doing.
I didn’t know what I was doing in init.d too but now I have to learn systemd services. Once you know a bit it will work then (probably)
I disagree. Before I had to copy and edit a huge-ass script (100+ lines) in init.d where 80% of it was concerned with PID files. I just want to start a process on boot, why is it so hard?
Now I can look at the documentation and write a simple unit file myself. It’s like 4 lines.
Before you copied some random file you edited and put it in init.d and it worked.
Before you copied some random file you edited and put it in init.d and it appeared to be working but then failed in random ways the first time you restarted, the first time you rebooted, the first time you restarted it via sudo instead of directly as root since some environment variable differed,…
So really it only appeared to be working in my experience because you had no real way to check.
I mean it should be obviously clear that copying random files isn’t sth. You should do anyways
Well, in this context what we are talking about is some random init script from some other service because nobody wants to write all that crap from scratch every time.
I’d like to propose a new rule for this community:
People criticizing systemd to the extent where they promote alternatives (regressions), have to provide proof that they have or are maintaining init scripts for at least ten services with satisfying the following conditions: said init scripts must 1.) be shown to reliably start up the services and 2.) not signal their dependencies to early and 3.) gracefully stop the services 99.9% of the time. People failing to satisfy these conditions are not allowed to voice their opinions on how arbitrary init systems are better than systemd. Violations of this rule will be punished by temporary bans and forcing the violators to fill the entire canvas of a blackboard with “‘do one thing and do it well’ is a unix principle, not a linux principle” in fine print.
More lines of semi-reliable init scripts have been written by package maintainers, than lines of systemd code by Poettering & Co, and that while achieving far less. The old init systems might have been simple, the hell of init scripts wasn’t.
That might have been true a decade ago. I don’t actually know. I do know that modern init scripts for modern alternatives to systemd are barely longer than systemd service scripts though. So that’s kind of an insane take.
can you give examples of some? Not trying to bd sarcastic, i do just want to see what alternatives are doing.
Sure, that seems pretty reasonable. Here’s the init script for sddm:
#!/usr/bin/openrc-run supervisor=supervise-daemon command="/usr/bin/sddm" depend() { need localmount after bootmisc consolefont modules netmount after ypbind autofs openvpn gpm lircmd after quota keymaps before alsasound want logind use xfs provide xdm display-manager }That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
That’s a pretty simple one though, so here’s Alsa. It’s a more complex one:
code
#!/usr/bin/openrc-run # Copyright 1999-2019 Gentoo Authors # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 alsastatedir=/var/lib/alsa alsascrdir=/etc/alsa.d alsahomedir=/run/alsasound extra_commands="save restore" depend() { need localmount after bootmisc modules isapnp coldplug hotplug } restore() { ebegin "Restoring Mixer Levels" checkpath -q -d -m 0700 -o root:root ${alsahomedir} || return 1 if [ ! -r "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" ] ; then ewarn "No mixer config in ${alsastatedir}/asound.state, you have to unmute your card!" eend 0 return 0 fi local cards="$(sed -n -e 's/^ *\([[:digit:]]*\) .*/\1/p' /proc/asound/cards)" local CARDNUM for cardnum in ${cards}; do [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 alsactl -E HOME="${alsahomedir}" -I -f "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" restore ${cardnum} \ || ewarn "Errors while restoring defaults, ignoring" done for ossfile in "${alsastatedir}"/oss/card*_pcm* ; do [ -e "${ossfile}" ] || continue # We use cat because I'm not sure if cp works properly on /proc local procfile=${ossfile##${alsastatedir}/oss} procfile="$(echo "${procfile}" | sed -e 's,_,/,g')" if [ -e /proc/asound/"${procfile}"/oss ] ; then cat "${ossfile}" > /proc/asound/"${procfile}"/oss fi done eend 0 } save() { ebegin "Storing ALSA Mixer Levels" checkpath -q -d -m 0700 -o root:root ${alsahomedir} || return 1 mkdir -p "${alsastatedir}" if ! alsactl -E HOME="${alsahomedir}" -f "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" store; then eerror "Error saving levels." eend 1 return 1 fi for ossfile in /proc/asound/card*/pcm*/oss; do [ -e "${ossfile}" ] || continue local device=${ossfile##/proc/asound/} ; device=${device%%/oss} device="$(echo "${device}" | sed -e 's,/,_,g')" mkdir -p "${alsastatedir}/oss/" cp "${ossfile}" "${alsastatedir}/oss/${device}" done eend 0 } start() { if [ "${RESTORE_ON_START}" = "yes" ]; then restore fi return 0 } stop() { if [ "${SAVE_ON_STOP}" = "yes" ]; then save fi return 0 }That’s definitely longer than a systemd service, but you’d have to write an awful lot of them to be more code than all of systemd. Overall the entire /etc/init.d folder on my PC where all the init scripts even for the stuff I’m not using are stored is a grand total of 147.7 KiB. Not exactly an unmanageable amount of code, in my humble opinion.
Its certainly easier to read than most old init scripts and I can see why some distros and openbsd would pick it over systemd for more control. I’m not likely to pick a distro that uses it anytime soon, but i can see why some do.
That’s totally fair. I’m not some weird evangelist or anything. I just like options and think OpenRC is kinda neat. There’s nothing wrong with systemd, and honestly it’s more work using other options. Not for the actual init system, but for some of the other stuff systemd does. I’ve had to learn cron, and that has been… interesting. It feels like all of the documentation around cron just assumes you already know how cron works. I’m still not sure if I’m doing it right, but I’ve had a good time and my computer works, and really that’s good enough for me.
Almost looks like something taken from ASL linux.
OK luddite.
Luddites were champions of the working class and have been smeared by capitalist for over a century. I’d be proud to be called a Luddite.
(In before history nerds um, actually me: chill…I know)
OK commie.
Aww sweetie. You’re cute.
I am. A lot of people fail to see that.
Poettering works for MS now? That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.
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people keep saying this, but what is their extinguish plan? how could they realistically extinguish linux? it’s not a company they can buy, or even a single thing they can ruin.
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That is my point, they have tried and failed completely before when their main product was windows licenses. Now, linux is incredibly important to their azure business, they wouldn’t want to potentially cause detriment to that and is far more important to them than windows licenses.
Also why would we have to rip out systemd, even if they tried to claim ownership of it and make it proprietary, it could be forked from before the license change and we would keep on going like nothing happened.
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What are you even talking about? systemd is currently under an opensource license, they cant retroactively change that. Any changes would be for it going forward if it is even possible for them to buy the rights to it (which I’m not convinced it is as Lennart Poettering is not the sole contributor and Red Hat / IBM and many others also have a significant stake in it). Sun patented Java on it upon its creation and when oracle bought sun, they bought the rights to those patents. They aren’t comparable situations. Java was never open source, it was source available, but still proprietary.
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This sounds a bit ridiculous. If Linus started working at MS I wonder if people would suddenly think Linux was a MS project and start hating on it.
Hopefully Microsoft will never make a guide on how to install Firefox because then we’d have to have a panic about that too
Kind of sad there are still people raging over systemd. When it flares up in discussions there is the usual debunked nonsense:
- it only logs information to binary and this is somehow bad. Except it it can be configured to log to text as well and it uses binary so it can forward secure sign records to prevent tampering as well as offering database style query operations.
- it’s insecure because the repo has millions of lines of code. Except that they compile into hundreds of small binaries running with least privilege, and often replacing the task of far more dangerous processes (e.g. there is an NTP client in systemd which sets the time and nothing else).
- various rants about the primary author
What is more bizarre is the nostalgia and hearkening back to sysvinit scripts when systemd didn’t replace sysvinit! Systemd replaced upstart which replaced sysvinit. Because writing 100s of lines of script to stop/start/restart a process sucked - insecure, slow, didn’t scale, didn’t capture dependencies and everyone knew it. Upstart was the first attempt to solve the issue and was used in Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora / Red Hat, openSUSE and others until systemd came along.
anyone ever seen a goldwing? it was supposed to be a motorcycle but for some reason has a fridge, microwave and what not added.
it is still a motorcycle. you can ride it. it starts right away and has all sorts of extra functions.
and now look at it. it is an ugly piece of engineering that only the weirdest of people like.
dont ride a goldwing. dont use systemd.
What are you talking about? The goldwing has been consistently hailed as one of the best touring motorcycle for almost 40 years. Every long distance rider I’ve spoken to says the goldwing is their favorite bike for cross country rides, and the ones who have sold theirs for a BMW or Harley touring bike have expressed regrets about changing.
Just because something has a lot of features, doesn’t mean it’s bad.
where i live ppl laugh about goldwing riders. it is considered the idiots bike: https://avida.cs.wright.edu/personal/wischgol/fsr/Guenther/Goldwing.html
…just one example.
google suggest in my country autocompletes goldwing with “mikrowelle” (microwave).
maybe we just have a different taste.
No clue about motorcycles but those things look neat and win awards. I want one now. Thanks for turning me on to this neat bike.
yeah sure. enjoy that and some systemd. everyone likes different things.
Poettering and Systemd are amazing and Linux would not be as good as it is today without them. Whether you like it or not, we can’t have a fragmented ecosystem and expect people and companies to adopt it (see the 14 competing standards XKCD). Having one solid base that works the same on every client is like literally the base requirement for making a product for the said client. Systemd, flatpak, xdg-portals, pipewire and immutable distros all solve this.
Here’s my hot take: I don’t care what operating system most people use. If people are happy on Windows, let them stay on Windows. That’s not my problem. When you say we need to make Linux less diverse and interesting to make number go up because more biggerer number more gooderer then suddenly that is my problem. You are trying to make my experience worse for the sake of something I do not care about.
There is nothing wrong with systemd. Most people on Linux are using it, and that’s fine. Options are good too though. I specifically like Linux because it’s NOT a bunch of homogeneous lowest common denominator sameyness. That’s the very thing I don’t want.
Ironically, pipewire is built to replace pulseaudio.
Hi am noob why systemd bad? I use Debian, is fucked?
Honestly I’ve been hearing about this for a while now but never bothered to check, I’m too lazy for that.
It’s not inherently bad, it “fails” the Unix Philosophy of “Do one thing and do it well” but since Linux’s kernel is:
- Unix-like, not Unix
- Fails this philosophy, as it does more than one thing but does all of it pretty well
- systemd is just a bundle of tools that do one thing and do it well under one package, like Linux’s kernel
It used to be a mess, but that’s solved. The biggest reason to avoid systemd is mainly user preference, not anything malicious. 90% of current distros use systemd as its easier for the maintainers and package programmers to build for the general than each package and each distro having their own methods of how to do an init system and other tasks.
How Debian and Arch and Gentoo and Slackware and other big distros worked was different, and the maintainers of those packages had to know “Debian’s way” and not a general way that most places accept. Systemd actually solved the Too Many Standards! issue.
I’ve never really seen a big argument against systemd, but maybe I’ve just not heard it.
back when you had an init system and you got it just the way you wanted it, you would be pissed that you had to move to systemd
now its there when you install and it is stable so it isn’t a big deal. But old beards hate change.
Old beards built linux and everything around, have some respect.
It also didn’t help that Poettering isn’t particularly popular on a personal level. I think there would have been a lot less drama if he had better people skills.
Yeah, but to be honest, I would have terrible “people skills” too if people sent me death threats over writing a free software.
I believe partly because it takes over so many responsibilities that it becomes a requirement for things that don’t need to require it. Plus it diverged from the Linux principle of do only one thing.
Also, afair, it was buggy for a while.
FYI: It’s called Unix principle, not Linux
What else besides running services can system.d do?
TL;DR init system, services, sockets, slices, logs, boots, VM’s, containers… and that’s fantastic, for monolithic systems.
journalctlgo brrrrStrap in, folks. Old timer with a gavel to slam.
When systemd is unfolded in full, people are sort of apt when they jokingly say “-Linux, or what I’d like to call gnu/systemd/Linux”. Some scream at the top of their lungs, yearning back to rc.0 days, “when everything was much simpler”… this is where the gavel comes down. There are so many improvements they are hard to list and if you asked me if I could go back, only with modern software, I would say nay… and here’s why:
Running services is a whole mess more than just running background apps, and it’s intrinsically intertwined with what is known as the init system - no matter what some people may think. Init is the process of initializing (or bootstrapping) an operating system, and services are background services, but both are about managing the processes within the Linux stack - or the thread. Some say that systemd is doing more than it should, but systemd is not “crossing streams” when both init processes and services need to be managed in concert depending upon the way a system inits - because there’s more than one way to init.
systemd manages init through scopes, slices and services, which combined create the hierarchy of processes used to bootstrap a system, get things up and running, with their relative permissions, in a given state, to facilitate a running and functioning system. Socket units handle socket files or destinations, and timer units handle event driven processes.
It all comes together into a dependency chain that defines your running system, which is testable and manageable from a set of tools.
systemctlis used to manage a running system, and I think it does a great job of it. Imagine fail testing a bunch of non-standardised, random rc bash script files that aren’t distro agnostic, along with whatever daemon runner you were using. It was a mess, and systemd sought to fix that - which imho it has. We view a booted Linux system and it’s process tree much differently through the systemd lens, which gives us a newfound focus that helps us better manage a running system.Also, logs are binary now… you’re all so spoiled and you don’t even know it. Do you remember 20GB txt files you absolutely had to open? Pepperidge farm remembers. Which brings us
journalctl, which is just so good. It’s the swizz army knife of Linux logs. You can point it at anything. Specify-kfor dmesg, a service using--unit, point to a binary in/usr/bin, select previous boot with-b -1,-ffor follow,-etake me to the end of a log. If you haven’t learned how to use this tool, you are running blind. It whips every dang logging system out there. Going from systemd to windows events feels like going from a soft mattress to the inside of an iron maiden.systemd-bootis blazing fast. Don’t get me wrong, Grub2 is still fantastic as well (Apple seems to think so at least), but considering ease of us - as I often do - I’m inclined to prefersystemd-bootbecause ofbootctl, because likejournalctl, it’s a wonderful piece of kit for managing, analyzing and failtesting boot images, provides UEFI functionality and being a sort of one-stop shop for the boot process.Now we we’re seeing systemd managing VM’s (
machinectl) and containers (containerctl), and honestly I’m all for it. Make my life easier. Please. Standardise that mess. And since it is standard, everyone supplies systemd units and because of the nature of systemd and it’s designs, it’s all fail-safed to hell and back. This is good. We want this. At least on the desktop, workstation, even some servers. For containers, embedded, not so much, as they aren’t monolithic systems. That being said, NixOS has proven that systemd isn’t a barrier to entry for new system paradigms either, so I feel those fears were unfounded.You get the theme here. Systemd is a system management suite, and not just a service runner or init system. It seems to grow and grow out of proportion, but at the end of the day, it’s about getting the system(s) and software up and running, as well as managing those processes and figuring out where problems lie. That’s what systemd does. It’s become part and parcel of a fully monolithic Linux stack, and in my opinion it’s a great project that makes our lives much easier.
To me systemd is zen. It’s the cup of tea Linux always needed, and I’m not ashamed to say so.
@taanegl @DmMacniel omg i was so prepared to hear a anti-lennart-pottering rant about sysv init scripts
thanks for what instead turned out to be a very thoughtful and educational text which i will now send to all these sysv ppl
To me systemd is fine, I am not really emotional at init systems. But on the other hand Linux is about choice and systemd kills that in some way because it does so much more than just starting services. GNOME is unusable without systemd, which makes it a no choice if you go into another rabbit hole. It’s kinda weird how deeply systemd is integrated in Linux these days. What I really dislike is that the log is in binary format by default which makes it necessary to deal with another tool to read logs. But well software changes, so do tools. But honestly the devs acted like dick heads sometimes, so I think most of the antipathy comes from their behavior and well yes MS now kinda pushing systemd because poettering works for them. I have fear that MS forces the systemd devs to implement things you cannot simply opt out of because it is so tightly integrated. Maybe copilot for writing systemd unit files would be nice though :P
well yes MS now kinda pushing systemd because poettering works for them. I have fear that MS forces the systemd devs to implement things you cannot simply opt out of because it is so tightly integrated.
How has MS pushed systemd?
That’s a nonsense spin of things. There wasn’t/isn’t a need for Microsoft to push systemd, because it had been adopted by all major linux distributions before Poettering even made the switch. It’s a straw that init system luddites clutch at.
I feel like the people who complain about systemd have never tried to mess with sysVinit scripts before
6+ years ago, I was trying to configure a touchscreen HAT for a raspberry pi, and dicking with the init.rc script was a massive pain
The alternatives to systemd isn’t init.d or some other legacy init systems. I use runit, pretty easy to understand and use. Stop being lazy dude
ITT: self-taught fanboys who don’t know how to spell “developed”.
